Open source machines, from the Fab Lab to the factory floor at Maker Faire Rome!

InMachines brings back open source innovation from digital fabrication to industrial production

 

InMachines is a German company with an unusual business model: it designs, builds and sells digital fabrication machines, then publishes everything needed to build them. Every laser cutter, 3D printer and CNC mill leaving its workshop in Schwarzenbek, near Hamburg, comes with full CAD, electronics, firmware and software under open source licences.

Founded in 2021 by Daniele Ingrassia, InMachines closes the gap between closed commercial machines and open hardware that stops at the prototype. Its machines run in Fab Labs, makerspaces and universities worldwide, and it has delivered more than 3 million euros of research and education projects, including mobile Fab Labs for Ukraine and Jordan. At Maker Faire Rome 2026 it brings three projects that tell this story: the Open Lab Starter Kit, the Open Industrial Starter Kit and Piccola CNC.

Ten years of open hardware, and a return to Rome

For Daniele, Maker Faire Rome is familiar ground. He exhibited here in 2015 and 2016 with satshakit, an Arduino-compatible microcontroller board that can be milled and soldered in any Fab Lab. It became one of the most replicated open boards in the Fab Lab network and the start of ten years of machine building.

LaserDuo, the first open source laser cutter with two sources, has been in the permanent exhibition of the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin since 2025. BigFDM is

OSHWA-certified and ranked among the ten best open source 3D printers. Daniele has also taught machine building for a decade: Fab Academy instructor since 2016, global Fab Lab mentor since 2017, workshops in more than ten countries, and co-author of Mastering Digitally Controlled Machines (Apress, 2024).

InMachines itself is deliberately small: five people from several countries, covering mechanical engineering, electronics, software and digital fabrication. Everyone has built, wired and debugged every machine in the catalogue, which is what makes documenting them for others possible.

Open Lab Starter Kit: a Fab Lab you can build yourself

The Open Lab Starter Kit (OLSK) starts from a simple question: what if a Fab Lab could build its own machines? Developed from 2022 to 2025 with Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg, within the dtec.bw research project “FabCity – Decentralised digital production for urban value creation”, OLSK is a complete inventory of eight open source machines: large and small 3D printers, laser cutters and CNC mills, a vinyl cutter and a 3D scanner.

Each machine went through three yearly iterations and is published on GitHub with full CAD, bills of materials, electronics and assembly manuals. All run on OLOS, the Open Lab Operating System, an open source web-based control software. The OLSK Large CNC runs daily at MotionLab.Berlin and the Small Laser was published in the journal HardwareX.

 

Open Industrial Starter Kit: open source metal 3D printing

The Open Industrial Starter Kit (OISK) is the next step. Where OLSK equipped the Fab Lab, OISK takes the same philosophy into industrial processes, starting with the most closed of all: metal 3D printing.

OISK is an open source metal 3D printer based on laser powder bed fusion, developed with Helmut Schmidt University since 2025. Commercial metal printers are expensive, proprietary and locked to their maker’s materials and software. OISK publishes the whole machine, from laser optics to control electronics, so research groups, universities and advanced labs can build, study and modify one. In Rome, OISK will be shown as a research project, with printed metal samples and the team on hand to discuss it.

Piccola CNC: 100% open source. Not 90%.

Piccola CNC is the first InMachines machine designed from day one as a product, and it makes its Italian debut in Rome. It is a desktop CNC mill with a 150 x 150 x 70 mm working area, ball screws on all three axes and repeatability below 10 µm, and it mills wood, plastics, PCBs, brass and aluminium.

The name is Italian, and so is the design: Piccola is “Italian design, built in Germany”. What sets it apart from other small CNC machines is its tagline: hardware, firmware and software are open source at delivery, with no proprietary cloud, no locked parts and no black boxes.

It is also one of the first open source desktop CNC mills engineered for full CE certification, now in progress. On the enclosed versions, a dual-channel magnetic interlock cuts spindle power the moment the door opens, reaching Performance Level c under EN ISO 13849-1: the safety level classrooms and shared workshops need, and one rarely found in open hardware.

The software is built in: an integrated CAM, based on the open source EasyTrace5000 and Kiri:Moto, prepares PCBs, 2D and 3D parts in the same interface that runs the job.

Automatic tool measurement, edge finding, height mapping and on-machine 3D scanning make setup a matter of a few taps. Visitors will see Piccola milling live and can join the launch list for the crowdfunding campaign, which starts in November 2026.

 

Meet the team at the stand

Four of the five people who make up InMachines will be in Rome for all three days, Daniele among them. They designed the frames, laid out the boards and wrote the firmware, so bring the hard questions: how an open source company makes a living, or how a small team gets a machine through CE certification.

Ten years after satshakit first appeared at Maker Faire Rome, InMachines is back with a full catalogue of open machines and its first product.

 

Come visit InMachines at Maker Faire Rome, Booth M.17: buy now your ticket, see you at Gazometro Ostiense!